The 25 countries with the most airline accidents and fatalities

Wreckage of a passenger jet bound for St. Petersburg in Russia that crashed in Egypt.
Maxim Grigoriev/Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations via AP
Russia is mourning the loss of a St. Petersburg-bound charter flight that crashed Oct. 31 in Egypt, killing all 224 passengers and crewmembers on board.

This disaster joins a spate of fatal commercial airline crashes in recent years — including the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in March 2014 and the downing of a second Malaysia Airlines plane, flight MH17, in July 2014.

The high-profile nature of such commercial airline crashes might make it seem that such events are on the rise; however, it's actually never been safer to fly, Harro Ranter, CEO of Aviation Safety Network, told Tech Insider via email.

When you look at the number of fatal accidents since 1950, we've actually seen a continuous downward trend since the early 2000s.

Not all geographical regions of the world have been affected equally in the past 70 years, though. Below is a chart of the 25 countries with the most fatal commercial airline accidents since 1945, sourced with data from the Aviation Safety Network.

Note that these statistics do not include military, corporate jet, and hijacking incidents (e.g. 9/11):

Russia and Brazil, along with the US, also "account for a substantial amount of world air traffic," Ranter said.

But in 2011, Russia snagged the title as the most dangerous country to fly from, according to The Wall Street Journal. A rash of fatal accidents there prompted investigations into its airline industry, which found "ineffective regulation, inefficiently small airlines and poorly trained pilots not following modern safety procedures," according to The Journal.

Brazil also has "a challenging environment, especially inland with remote airstrips in the Amazon that do not have the same equipment compared to airports of the larger cities," Ranter said.

Still, your odds of being killed in an airplane crash on one of the 78 major world airlines, according to Plane Crash Info, is only 1 in 4.7 million. You're more likely to be killed by a strike of lightning, a dog attack, an earthquake, and even an asteroid impact across your lifetime than in an airplane crash.